YMCA Child Care Center Offers Key to Resources So Many Parents Seek

Where can I find the right kind of child care? How can I learn anything about the people who will care for my child? Who can tell me how much child care should cost?

Those are questions that parents ask over and over again.

But where do they go for answers?

In 1985, more than 19,000 people in San Diego County called the Child Care Resource Center, a state-funded organization run by the YMCA.

“I’m still astounded that more people don’t know about them,” said Denise Dudoit, a parent who found care for her four children through the center.

The center is the outgrowth of a program started five years ago by then-Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr. to establish a statewide system to help parents find child care providers, according to Jean Brunkow, the center director.

The center helps parents find affordable, licensed child care centers in their own neighborhoods. If money is a problem, alternative payment plans can be arranged. The center also helps parents to more easily recognize the child care provider that would best meet their needs.

“I was in child care for 10 years before this program became available . . . I always felt the need for coordination of services,” Brunkow said.

The Child Care Resource Center, 1033 Cudahy Place, is the only organization of its kind in the county, but there are 64 similar state-funded child care referral agencies in other counties.

Since it opened, the San Diego center has become involved in nearly every aspect of child care but considers its most important role to be educational.

The center is involved in employer-sponsored child care, conducting seminars, consulting, child care referral, providing financial assistance for needy parents, providing support groups for child care workers, and helping fledgling child care centers get off the ground. The center also has a library that includes toys, books and other materials.

“They are performing a vital service for the community,” said Capt. Jack Hodgens, Navy family services coordinator in San Diego. He said the center has been instrumental in helping Navy families find licensed, quality child care in areas where they live.

“We have very limited child care resources in the military,” Hodgens said. He said the Navy has four child-care facilities that care for 30 to 50 children each. There are, however, 40,000 Navy families in San Diego County, Hodgens said, and the result is a “tremendous waiting list” of families trying to get children into those facilities.

“Most of the child care centers in town are too expensive for our military members,” he said, but “just because we can only afford low cost doesn’t mean we should only get low quality.”

Typical child care costs in the county range from $75 to $125 per week for an infant, $50 to $60 for a child 3 to 5 years old and $30 to $40 for school-age children, said Brunkow. The resource center has helped Navy families find child care at much lower rates, she said.

Dudoit was one parent who couldn’t afford those prices. Before discovering the center nearly five years ago, she was paying $120 a week for the care of her three oldest children.

“And that was very cheap,” she said.

The center’s alternative payment plan, designed for families like Dudoit’s, serves about 300 children, said Brunkow. There are about 1,000 more children on the waiting list, she said. Associate Director Doris Lipska explained that the payment plan gives preference to the poorest families first, since funds are limited. For example, a single mother with two children can earn as much as $955 a month before being charged a fee for child care, she said.

Under the alternative payment plan provided by the center, Dudoit now pays only about $7 a week for half a day of care for her two youngest children. She said that without the center’s help, she probably would not have been able to keep her job of five years as a medical clerk at UC San Diego.

“I had just left my ex-husband, given birth to my last child (her fourth) and started my new job” as a clerk when she read about the center on a flyer, Dudoit said.

Christine McMullen, 21, of El Cajon feels the same way. She is the single parent of a 21-month-old girl who has cerebral palsy.

This year she is receiving free child care, thanks to a federal grant the center received in September. She was one of 19 financially troubled parents with handicapped children to receive free care under the experimental program.

“It was better than winning the lottery,” McMullen said.

For Lisa Mendoza, 31, the resource center provided the alternative to being on welfare. After being enrolled in the alternative payment plan in September, the mother of four was able to get a job and get off welfare and become self-supporting.

“I’ve always had it in me to be independent,” she said.

The resource center has helped Gail Knight to be independent in a different sort of way. Knight has operated Growing Tree Prep, a child care and learning center, out of her Southeast San Diego home for six years. She was referred to the resource center when it first opened and has used the center ever since.

“They help to build your self-esteem . . . they also train you in dealing with parents,” she said.

Knight said that, as a child care worker who operates out of her home, it is easy to feel alone in a profession where parents can “treat me like a baby sitter or a maid.”

A network that allows child care providers to share information and offers seminars on how to deal with the stress of being a child care worker has helped Knight and others become more effective in their work.

“They work with you to decide what sort of an image you want to project . . . it gives you more of a professional feeling about what you do,” she said.

For Gerlinde Topzand, director of the Salvation Army Children’s Learning Center, the help of the resource center has “been a godsend.”

Topzand is in charge of an operation that serves 300 children ranging from 2 to 12 years old. The Learning Center is really a consortium for employees of the Salvation Army, Sharp Memorial Hospital, Sharp Cabrillo Hospital, Sharp Knollwood Hospital, Sharp Reese Stealey Clinics, Children’s Hospital, the Vista Hill Foundation, Mesa Vista Hospital, Vista Hill Hospital, Douglas Young Clinic, South Bay Guidance Center and Los Ninos Education Center.

The center employs a full-time staff of 16 and gives first preference to children whose parents are employees of companies that belong to the consortium.

“Anytime I had a question about anything (in child care), they were there to answer . . . . I have used them endlessly,” she said of the resource center.

Topzand also praised the center’s efforts to keep the community updated on the latest developments in child care.

“They’re very good about getting positive information out to the community about what’s new in child care,” she said.

The resource center also helps inform employers about the benefits of employer-sponsored child care, said Anne Spicer, director of the Junior League’s Child Care Networking Project.

Spicer’s job involves setting up employer-sponsored child care centers. So far there are three--in Solana Beach, Kearny Mesa and downtown--she said.

“I would say that the Child Care Resource Center has been an integral part of getting the centers opened,” she said.

Spicer said that the center has helped her by giving seminars and bringing in speakers to talk to employers.

“Through (the resource center’s) hard work and dedication, they’re really providing a service that this community needs,” she said.